MY LOST TODDLERHOOD

After my divorce, I moved house and dragged with me a padded brown envelope. It contained my abandoned novel, The Lessons . Throughout my adolescence, it ate me up inside. My intrusive thoughts drove the plot. A disfigured man, a derelict house and a psychopath. I stuffed the thing into the loft, where it lay untouched for fifteen years. During that time, I ‘moved on’. The following account is taken from my book, Mirror Image Shattered . I worked twelve years in an office, raised my children (with a new partner after two years of being single), and proved to myself that I could be a decent parent after all. The fear of becoming an ‘ogre parent’ like Dad had almost cost my motherhood, but slowly I learned I could give my children the stability I craved. My Past Follows Me Around My sibling and I rarely spoke of our difficult childhood. We talked about our kids, our jobs, the good times — not the years of living with a mentally ill dad. I still believed in the red herring: that my intrus...

People often told me I should have been a model. My identical twin even had a brief modelling stint and appeared in the local paper. I had fair, angular features, blue eyes from Dad, an early growth spurt that made me tall against other schoolgirls. But inside, I felt ugly. Disfigured and unfeminine. Adolescence came like a spotlight shining on me and all I wanted to do was hide in the dark. I didn’t want anyone looking at me. My mirror image seemed to hide an inner disfigurement. Analysis taken from my book The Lessons My book Mirror Image Shattered explains, my diaries from college describe ‘terrible shyness,’ times where I froze for an hour at Christmas parties, terrified boys would detect the black, ugly thing I drag around. I feared people would see this other self in my eyes. I feared they would find me uneasy to be around. She’s a bit ‘weird’, ‘eerie’. She doesn’t say much. What’s wrong with her? I envied carefree girls who revel in being themselves and joke around with other b...